“I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about our local cordiality. All the reports from Belinda McCormack’s death are in that box. I copied them for you and I won’t even make you pay the copy costs.”

To my next question, he answered that he had never heard anyone mention the name Esme. He showed me a list that Jill McCormack had compiled of Belinda’s close friends at the time of her death: Caroline, Celeste, Laura, Kilty and Anastasia. While he agreed that this was a notorious case, it was Pete’s opinion that if Belinda had not been a beautiful blonde girl on campus, whose mother had the wit and determination to focus on dating abuse as an issue, there would be no echoes. Women in America died every day at the hands of the men they loved. They ran the gamut, from poor unemployed mothers, flight attendants to Broadway actors, advertising executives. They answered the phone at the water utility or taught second grade. When I told him that many of those very women had reached out to Jill’s organization, he shrugged and said he hoped awareness would make a difference because many of the women whose lovers hit them felt oddly guilty, as if they deserved it. Your own side of that story, he said, might not be so popular; but there were plenty of people on the wrong side of the equation in a case of violent death—yet deserving of a certain kind of empathy too. There was no such thing as too much understanding.

I told him about the strange incidents at our house, not just the demonstrations (he already knew about those) but about the unexplained car fire and how someone came in when we weren’t home and drew black dots over the eyes on our photographs.

“Ruined them forever...” he said, genuinely downcast.

“No, it was just on the glass. But whoever it was used some kind of oil-based marker, so it was hell to get it off.”

I told him about the slender young man in the hoodie and the aviator glasses, his appearances on my street, on my campus, and now here. “It’s probably one of the most frustrating things about something like this that yes, it’s wrong and scary and creepy, but it’s not a crime, not until there’s some kind of threat.”

“And then I bet it’s too late most of the time.”

“Once in a while it’s too late, but not most of the time. Unless somebody is really nuts, a person will usually obey a restraining order. But it’s the ones who don’t obey it that worry you. Either they know the system, and they don’t care about it, or they don’t care about anything.”